NEW ORLEANS – As the fire crackled closer and chest-high floodwaters churned around him, Timothy Brennan was possessed by a single thought: Help his family and neighbors escape.

He wasn't thinking free flights, football or the Super Bowl. He was thinking of his mom and his neighbors and getting them to safety as Superstorm Sandy roared ashore. He put on a wet suit and traveled from house to house on a paddleboard, helping more than a dozen people escape.

But Brennan's actions in Breezy Point, N.Y., the night of Oct. 29, when Sandy pummeled most of his neighborhood and fires mauled the rest, has won him an unexpected trip to Super Bowl XLVII in New Orleans next month.

The ticket to the big game comes courtesy of Robert Fogarty, a New Orleans entrepreneur who photographed Brennan last year for his Dear World photography project, which takes pictures of people across the USA with personal messages scrawled on their body. The NFL has offered to pick up the airfare.

Brennan, 33, an iron worker who helps reinforce concrete in skyscrapers, has never been to a Super Bowl. He said he was stunned to get the call.

Longtime neighbor Marie Lopresti, 72, who said she would have died in her home that night if Brennan hadn't helped her out, said the boy she still calls "Timmy" deserves the ticket and more.

"He's our angel," she said. "All the time, he was just helping everyone."

As it did to much of the northeast coast, Hurricane Sandy decimated Breezy Point, a blue-collar community populated with firefighters, police officers and other first responders.

A house fire that sped through the community as the tide surged destroyed 135 homes, said Sebastian Danese, a captain in the Point Breeze Volunteer Fire Department, one of the few units who stayed in Breezy Point through the storm.

Brennan's actions that night – and those of others like him – saved dozens of lives in the beachfront community, he said.

"He helped his neighbors rather than run off on his own," Danese said. "That's Breezy Point. That's what people here do."

Brennan moved back into his mom's Breezy Point home five years ago to save money to buy a house of his own and decided to ride out the storm there, he said. But when water began pouring into his basement, he moved his mom, Catherine Brennan, 68, next door to Lopresti's house.

An avid paddleboard rider, Timothy Brennan pulled on his wet suit and used his 12-foot-long paddleboard to shuttle between the two homes, he said.

That's when he saw the first fireball: a softball-sized flaming orb riding hurricane-force gusts that slammed into his mom's house. Then another and another. A house down the road had caught fire and was quickly spreading through the neighborhood on the gusty winds.

Brennan hustled his mom and Lopresti out of the home, onto his paddleboard, and down the flooded road to a neighbor's house, he said. He then went house to the house, returning with more neighbors. He'd peek into windows and pound on doors to make sure no one was sleeping through the storm, he said.

"We knew we had to get out of that area," Brennan said. "It was about making sure that everybody in the community was alright."

As the fire closed in, he and a few other men led the group of residents, now numbering 15, through the dark water to higher ground, taking turns carrying the younger kids, he said. Cars floated by and nearby propane tanks could be heard exploding in the fire, Brennan said. Thick smoke seeped into homes.

"This thing was jumping from house to house within minutes," Brennan said.

The group eventually made it to St. Thomas More Catholic Church and were later evacuated to a hotel near John F. Kennedy International Airport, he said. Brennan stayed behind with a neighbor and, at dawn, got his first glimpse of his mom's two-story home: It had burned down to its foundation.

Kathleen Curtin, 32, who knows Brennan from spending summers in Breezy Point growing up and whose mother still lives there, said she wasn't surprised to hear of his actions.

"I'm not sure those people would be alive today if there weren't people like Timmy who said, 'You don't have a choice, you're coming,'" she said. "The fact that there's not a single death in Breezy is miraculous."

Since the storm, Brennan has been sleeping on friends' couches. He's returned to work but lost nearly all of his belongings. "Everything's replaceable," he said.

In December, Fogarty traveled to Breezy Point with a team of photographers and videographers to capture the devastation and raise awareness of the event.

Through his Dear World project, Fogarty has photographed celebrities such as Drew Brees and Susan Sarandon, personal messages scrawled on their hands and forearms, but also disaster zones, such as Joplin, Mo., after a tornado in 2011 razed much of the town and killed more than 150 residents.

At Breezy Point, he found Brennan rummaging through the charred remains of his home. He photographed him in front of his ruined home. Across one of his forearms Brennan wrote, "The Reason Why We Fall," and across the other, "Is So We Can Get Up Again."

Overall, Fogarty and his team took 35 portraits of Breezy Point residents. But it was Brennan that lingered in his mind, he said. When the NFL gave him two Super Bowl tickets in exchange for a photo shoot, he called Brennan and offered him one of the tickets. Fogarty is also trying to raise money for Breezy Point residents through his Dear World website (www.dearworld.me), he said.

"The rest of the world has moved on," he said. "But Breezy Point and Tim and those guys are still in it every day."

A longtime Jets fan, Brennan said he's looking forward to coming to New Orleans and experiencing the city as well as the game. The NFL has offered to pay his airfare to New Orleans, but hotel rooms in the city are nearly sold out for that weekend. So Fogarty offered him his couch while in town, he said.